Learning At educator's academy
Any Time, Any Place, Any Pace
At Educator's Academy, our mission is to provide high-quality professional growth opportunities to teachers and school leaders.
We want to make it easy for teachers and schools to embark on learning experiences that lead to real improvement in student outcomes and staff workdays. Whether you are an individual that wants to gain new skills or a group that wants to engage in collaborative learning, Educator's Academy's courses are designed to be flexibly implemented to meet your needs.
what's wrong with traditional training Models?
Off-Site Training & Conferences
Off-Site Training & Conferences
Off-Site Training & Conferences
Off-site training events and conferences are expensive. Travel, lodging, food, and registration costs quickly add to hundreds, or even thousands of dollars per event. Substitute teacher shortages make it even more difficult to release teachers to attend.
Because they are costly, schools typically send a few teachers (often the most talented and dedicated) with the hope that they can bring back new knowledge and skills and shared it with the staff that didn't attend. But few schools have formal processes in place for how that learning is shared. Too often that knowledge is not shared in a meaningful way and the larger staff community benefits little from the expensive endeavor.
Relying on external events is not a scalable solution to engage every educator in consistent professional development and growth.
On-Site Training & Workshops
Off-Site Training & Conferences
Off-Site Training & Conferences
On-site training and workshops don't have the same travel costs as off-site events, but paying for an external trainer to come to your school is not cheap either. A single-day workshop can cost thousands of dollars. And you still need to find substitutes or hope that the trainer is available on one of your limited release days.
Like off-site training, on-site training is typically implemented as an "event" that last one or a few days. After that, the expert trainer leaves and teachers are left to figure the rest out themselves. Even when teachers are excited about what they learned, the lack of formal time for ongoing sense-making, implementation, feedback, and evaluation tend to prevent much training from being sustainably implemented.
On-site training is logistically difficult, expensive, and seldom is provided enough time for deeper learning and application to occur.
Online Training Courses
Off-Site Training & Conferences
Online Training Courses
Online courses have a few advantages over in-person training. First, they tend to be much less expensive than in-person events. Second, they are more flexible allowing participants to study based on their schedule and sometimes even move at their own pace.
Theses advantages come at a cost ... engagement. Participants typically report much lower levels of engagement when they sit in front of a computer to learn. By eliminating the social-emotional element from the learning process, digital courses struggle to make learning stick. Self-motivated learners can make the most of easily accessible digital content, but the rest find the experience underwelming.
While very effective for small, technical topics (like learning a new software), online courses are less effective at grappling with more complicated topics.
How is educator's academy Hybrid model different?
Collaborative Learning Model
Collaborative Learning Model
Collaborative Learning Model
Most courses in Educator's Academy are designed to be taken collaboratively. Like a book club, groups of educators engage with the course content asynchronously in a way that works best for them. Then, making use of shared collaborative time (department meetings, early release days, etc), they meet in-person to engage in the course material in a deeper way. Here, they grapple with the ideas and practices from the course to make sense of it, apply it to their unique context, get suggestions and feedback, and evaluate student outcomes.
Hybrid collaborative courses make the most of the limited time educators have to collaborate with one another by using digital content enhanced with shared learning experiences.
Build Local Capacity
Collaborative Learning Model
Collaborative Learning Model
Every school has at least a few high capacity staff and schools need to find ways to keep them engaged, elevate their status, and leverage their talents to improve everyone's performance. Unfortunately, these same teachers, and even dedicated instructional coaches, don't have the time required to develop learning experiences for others in all the topics staff might want to engage in.
Educator's Academy courses do the heavy lifting of organization both the asynchronously delivered content and the in-person activities that make the learning relevant and applicable. By identifying local staff to facilitate learning rather than develop it, schools can build local capacity quickly and efficiently.
Supercharged PLCs
Professional Development At Scale
Professional Development At Scale
Many schools have figured out that intermittent, fly-by training experiences are not having the impact they desire. To engage their staff in deeper, more reflective, and applied learning experiences, they have implemented professional learning communities (PLCs). By organizing staff into small teams (3-5 people) focussed around a specific topic and giving them time to explore that topic over weeks or months, teachers find more relevance in the subject matter and are more likely to implement a change of practice in their classroom.
Leveraging digital courses designed to be implement collaboratively has the potential to supercharge a school's PLC program by pre-organizing content, providing protocols and activities, and introducing accountability for progress and completion.
Professional Development At Scale
Professional Development At Scale
Professional Development At Scale
Scaling professional develop to impact dozens or even hundreds of teachers is nearly impossible for schools without leveraging digital content. It's just too expensive to train everyone in-person and there aren't enough professional development hours in year to deliver impact at scale.
Using courses designed for a hybrid professional development model that leverages local talent to organized pre-developed content breaks the financial and logistical constraints of traditional training. Further, implementing a self-organized hybrid model means teachers get to benefit from social-emotional connections that make learning more engaging. Using Educator's Academy, training experiences can be highly differentiated to meet specific needs of the school or the teacher in a cost effective way that still delivers impact.
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